Blog
Honesty is the best policy. Adopting an attitude of being clear and upfront has many benefits in life, from reduced stress to better relationships, but it can also be valuable in your business and key to converting leads into real customers. SCORE mentors will tell you that developing an open and honest relationship with your leads is important for several reasons:
- Honesty creates trust. If a lead feels comfortable sharing their needs and concerns, you can address them directly.
Businesses move for all sorts of reasons. Existing rents may be too high; neighboring anchor tenants may have left; or perhaps you just need a bigger premise for your growing business!
But how can you ensure your existing customers move with you and how can you go about attracting new customers to your new location? Here are six tips:
1. Communicate Pre-Move and Post-Move
Many of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act affect small businesses differently depending on their size. For self-employed individuals in particular, there are new options for health coverage and other changes under the health care law that will directly affect you in the coming months.
New Options for Health Coverage through the Affordable Insurance Marketplaces
These days, loyal customers are hard to come by. So when you do have customers who are faithful to your business, returning day after day and year after year, you want to reward them. But how? There are many ways to reward your loyal customers, from simple paper-based methods to mobile apps and more. Here’s a look at some different options to consider.
The franchise industry, like all businesses, was not immune to the economic crisis of 2008 and the ensuing credit crunch. But the vital signs of a recovery are there. According to the International Franchise Association (IFA), many of the country’s business sectors currently starting to show growth mirror those sectors expected to be the leading drivers of employment in franchising this year. These include food service, health care, hospitality and construction—all sectors with a high concentration of franchise businesses.
With fast access to cash, convenience and all the perks that come along with it, a business credit card is a standard tool used by business owners.
But did you know that less than 50% of the credit cards obtained by business owners nationwide are actually in the company’s name?
It’s a shocking reality, to say the least, but the good news is there are plenty of business credit cards that cater to savvy business owners like you who understand the importance of establishing business credit.
Hiring employees is probably the most important decision any entrepreneur will ever make. But relinquishing some of the responsibility of your business to others is tough.
The key to getting it right is finding employees with the right value alignment and attitude (often easier said than done). Of course, you need to work at it too. Once you’ve built your team, learning to let go and empower employees is critical if you want focus on growing your business.
More and more small companies are using blogging to promote their business. In fact, in 2012, “small business” was one of the fastest growing categories in Technorati, a global blog search engine, with 20 percent growth that year alone (source: Small Business Blogging Proved Effective for the Year 2012 by Rahul Manekari).
Why? Blogs are a great tool for connecting with your customers and sharing your expertise. They also improve your company’s search engine rankings. Search engines love fresh, relevant and local content—and blogs deliver on this need.
Today, women-owned businesses are the fastest-growing segment of new businesses in our economy.
In fact, an analysis by American Express suggests that the number of women-owned businesses has risen by 200,000 over the past year alone, which is equivalent to just under 550 new women-owned firms created each day.
Regardless of how you slice the data, we know that this trend is growing and that women are over-indexing in entrepreneurship.